Christian Influence

(Note: I am cleaning up some posts that never got published. This one, from mid-last year, was a reply to a leftist on Citizen Tom’s site who wanted to eliminate entirely the influence of Christians from politics. He objected when I called him on it.)

@tildeb,

You claim I am misrepresenting you in the post you are replying to. Let a candid world consider the following facts. Here is my entire relevant paragraph:

You have expounded at length demonstrating that you do not, as denying Christians any “influence,” prohibiting public expressions of Christian faith, and forcing Christians to act against their beliefs under pain of jail are all part of what you call “freedom of religion.” No framer of the Constitution would recognize your arguments, nor the country you envision.

This contains a limited number of assertions of your position:

That you wish to deny Christians influence

You had written:

My ‘final solution’ is to maintain the law that separates woo-meisters from influencing the public domain.

There is no such law, but your lack of understanding here is well known. You had previously referred to Citizen Tom with the term “woo”; you are theoretically referring to all religions, which include Christianity of course, but you’ve demonstrated a special fire in your heart against Christianity.

That you wish to prohibit public expressions of Christian faith

Here are the mechanisms you would enlist in this prohibition, since the law is not on your side:

We – all of us who value freedom of religion – need to wake up and treat public expressions of religious belief with the distrust, disdain, and criticism it so richly deserves. It has no business in the public square, no business with public policy, governance, education, medicine, defense, no business interfering with access to reproductive treatments and therapies and procedures, no right to receive public tax exemptions and unpaid services, no privileged voice whatsoever but the right to be mercilessly mocked and ridiculed and made a pariah in the public domain.

It is clear enough that you wish to prohibit such public expressions of religious belief, and could you enact a law for it you would do so.

That you wish to force Christians to act against their beliefs under pain of jail

You actually touched on this in your previous diatribe:

no business interfering with access to reproductive treatments and therapies and procedures

You consider “interfering with access” to abortion as being unwilling to pay for it, and you would force people to pay for it against their religious beliefs on pain of jail. Were this not true, there’d be nothing here for you to complain of, since the Hobby Lobby case was about forcing them to pay for it. Access was available to the abortifacients through any number of other avenues.

You have claimed a “legal right” to force individuals to sell goods and services sold “in the public domain” to be sold to anyone, for any purpose. I addressed your hypocrisy in a previous comment:

Here, you speak of a “right” to force someone to produce goods or services for you, and in fact you named your claim on their goods and services a “legal right” that would be “reduced” if they were allowed to decide who they wished to provide them to. Where did such a right come from, do you think? Does it apply to religious opinions? Political opinions? The right to keep and bear arms?

I will give Marcuse credit for the notion of humans becoming extensions of the commodities they buy. He died just before the rise of cellphones, but that description certainly applies. But his idea that any art, or any other form of expression, must be destroyed or suppressed if it did not support his totalitarian ideals … we are seeing that coming into play increasingly on college campuses, in media coverage, and in the attacks on businesses like Chick-Fil-A.

It is thus not surprising to me that the only group of people who make a career out of attacking and destroying the careers of gays are hard-left Democrats, who endeavor to make life miserable for any gay who happens to be conservative. The attackers have never been very successful, as conservatives are far more tolerant and “outing” a gay employee does not cause them much heartburn. But it certainly burns the Left that a gay person, a woman, or a black is conservative and thus “off the plantation.” Somehow, among the “rights” that the Left has claimed is the right to attack such people and deny them a livelihood.